Time, ahem, for a confession: I was rooting for Miley Cyrus
to be named TIME magazine's “Person of the Year.” Why? When you look at
the list of winners since 1927 (the award has had different titles,
changed to “Person of the Year” in 1999), you'll note that very few women have ever won. Shame! In addition, no singers, actors, or entertainers have ever won. Surprise!
And, as far as I can tell, no twerkers, strippers, or talentless hacks
have ever won (Ted Turner might be a jerk, but I don't think he's
without talent). Soooo!

Another confession: I don't think
I've picked up and read an issue of TIME since the early 1990s. I've
read online articles on the TIME site over the years, usually the
snarky, poorly reasoned diatribes penned by (now former) senior editor
Amy Sullivan, who passes for a religion journalist but is mostly adept
at penning this sort of nonsense (in May 2009): “At the rate things are
going, Pope Benedict XVI may find his next trip to the U.S. dogged by
airplanes overhead trailing banners with images of aborted fetuses.” As I noted at the time,
Sullivan was “once again ham-fistedly mixing together sensationalized
'controversies' with a shallow understanding of Church teaching and
practice.”

Speaking of such shallowness, did you see TIME's
original mini-bio of Pope Francis? It stated that “the first Jesuit
Pontiff won hearts and headlines with his common touch and rejection of
church dogma and luxury.” At least they put dogma before luxury. That
may have been a lively debate:

Editor: “I think it should be 'rejection of church luxury and dogma'.”

Writer (smacking gum): “Uh, yeah, I wasn't sure about that. Will do.”

Editor: “Hmmm. No, wait. We better give the nod to dogma. Some Catholics are still into that stuff.”

But since Pope Francis has yet to cast aside the Blessed Trinity or downgrade the Incarnation (don't hold your breath!), TIME had to come up with some good reasons for the pontiff to be “Person of the Year.” This is where things get interesting:

As
Pope, he was suddenly the sovereign of Vatican City and head of an
institution so ­sprawlingwith about enough followers to populate
Chinaso steeped in order, so snarled by bureaucracy, so vast in its
charity, so weighted by its scandals, so polarizing to those who study
its teachings, so mysterious to those who don’t, that the gap between
him and the daily miseries of the world’s poor might finally have seemed
unbridgeable. Until the 266th Supreme Pontiff walked off in those
clunky shoes to pay his hotel bill.

So that's it: he pays his
bills? While wearing clunky shoes? Miraculous! More seriously, when I
was reading about the snarling bureaucracy, the weighty scandals, the
polarizing pontifications, I thought I was reading about the Obama
administrationbut then reminded myself: “No, nothis is TIME magazine.
Snap out of it!” (Whew, that was a close call.) Let's continue:

The
papacy is mysterious and magical: it turns a septuagenarian into a
superstar while revealing almost nothing about the man himself. And it
raises hopes in every corner of the worldhopes that can never be
fulfilled, for they are irreconcilable. The elderly traditionalist who
pines for the old Latin Mass and the devout young woman who wishes she
could be a priest both have hopes. The ambitious monsignor in the
Vatican Curia and the evangelizing deacon in a remote Filipino village
both have hopes. No Pope can make them all happy at once.

Which is
a shame, really, because the job description for Pope is quite simple:
“Make everyone happy. Now! Hurry up!” It goes without saying that Jesus,
in addressing the freshly renamed Peter, was deeply concerned with
everyone being happy, which goes a long way to explain why he called
Peter “Satan” just a short while after establishing him as head apostle
and “Rock” upon which the Church would be built (see Matthew 16:15-23 if
you are one of those weirdos who actually reads the Bible).

And while we're quibbling, it must be noted that most traditionalists, by any account of that term, are fairly young and
they can, in fact, attend “the old Latin Mass,” also known as the
Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. Meanwhile, the angry old women who
want to be priests (trust me, they are almost all past sixty years old)
might have hope, but it's not a hope based on the Church's teachings
and traditions. No, it's usually based in some rant about “old men” in
the Vatican and an appeal to a mail order degree in women's studies.
Again, just a quibble, like noting that 2+2 cannot be both 4 and
2,153,1644.

By the way, this little matter of ordaining women is interesting in this context because when John Paul II was named TIME's “Person of the Year” in 1994,
the magazine included this bit of commentary: “Despite his modern role,
his rule has not been without controversy. His declaration that women
may not serve as priests and his attempt to apologize for historic
prejudices and injustices by the Catholic Church received virulent
criticism.” And then, in an article this past February
about the resignation of Benedict XVI, the magazine described Francis'
predecessor as a “figure as controversial as John Paul II was
popular...” Get that? The bad news for Benedict is that he won't be
“popular” until he dies; the good news is that he doesn't care about
being popular.

The February 2013 article also added, “Reformers,
especially American ones, eager for the ordination of women or a more
liberal view of human sexuality got what they expected from Benedict:
nothing.” Come to think of it, John Paul II gave them the same package
of nothing. Oh, and don't look now, but Francis has made it clear that
he's going to hang with John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Jesus Christ on
this one: “The reservation of the priesthood to males, as a sign of
Christ the Spouse who gives himself in the Eucharist, is not a question
open to discussion, but it can prove especially divisive if sacramental
power is too closely identified with power in general” (Evangelii Guadium, 104).

That
is about as gentle but obvious of a papal smack down as you'll find,
but it warrants no mention in TIME magazine (not that quote from EG, to
be specific). Why? Because the magazine apparently figures that the
attraction to Francis comes not from being Catholic, but from being,
well, a celebrity unbound from the dead weight of dogma:

But
what makes this Pope so important is the speed with which he has
captured the imaginations of millions who had given up on hoping for the
church at all. People weary of the endless parsing of sexual ethics,
the buck-passing infighting over lines of authority when all the while
(to borrow from Milton), “the hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed.” In
a matter of months, Francis has elevated the healing mission of the
churchthe church as servant and comforter of hurting people in an often
harsh worldabove the doctrinal police work so important to his recent
predecessors. John Paul II and Benedict XVI were professors of theology.
Francis is a former janitor, nightclub bouncer, chemical technician and
literature teacher.

Oh, please. Have we already forgotten that
John Paul II was a playwright, teacher, and poet who worked in a mine
and did other manual labor? Besides, since when did most editors at TIME
know anything about challenging, physical work?

(Nice touch, by
the way, with the “endless parsing” bit, as if it takes an advanced
degree in theology to know that fornication, adultery, homosexual acts,
masturbation, and use of contraceptives are grave sins. Period. What
used to be common knowledge among young teens has now become a
bewildering maze of moral complexity to adults.)

That aside, the
obviousand obviously wrongassumption here is that doctrine is somehow
opposed to the tasks of pastoring, helping, aiding, and feeding those
who are starving, both spiritually and physically. Granted, there's no
denying the power and challenge of these words of the Pope:

Love
of neighbour, grounded in the love of God, is first and foremost a
responsibility for each individual member of the faithful, but it is
also a responsibility for the entire ecclesial community at every level:
from the local community to the particular Church and to the Church
universal in its entirety. As a community, the Church must practise
love.

There's also no denying that those words were written by Benedict XVI in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est
(“God Is Love”) which consisted of two main parts: a theological
reflection on the nature of true love, and an examination of the
concrete practice of charity both within and without the Church. Of
course, this next statement is more “Benedict-ish” in character, isn't
it?

All
revealed truths derive from the same divine source and are to be
believed with the same faith, yet some of them are more important for
giving direct expression to the heart of the Gospel. In this basic core,
what shines forth is the beauty of the saving love of God made manifest
in Jesus Christ who died and rose from the dead. In this sense, the
Second Vatican Council explained, “in Catholic doctrine there exists an
order or a ‘hierarchy’ of truths, since they vary in their relation to
the foundation of the Christian faith”. This holds true as much for the
dogmas of faith as for the whole corpus of the Church’s teaching,
including her moral teaching.

Yes, you've guessed it: written by Francis
the doctrine-bashing, dogma-thrashing, touchy-feely pope who never
talks about abortion or anything controversialexcept when he does. In
truth, talk of mercy, love, and other glorious-sounding topics is quite
empty, even banal, if they are not rooted in transcendent, objective
truth, and that is something Francis has made clear time and time again.
For example:

Just
as the organic unity existing among the virtues means that no one of
them can be excluded from the Christian ideal, so no truth may be
denied. The integrity of the Gospel message must not be deformed. What
is more, each truth is better understood when related to the harmonious
totality of the Christian message; in this context all of the truths are
important and illumine one another. (EG, 39).

To be
fair, it seems quite evident that Pope Francis has, in some way or
another, “captured the imaginations of millions who had given up on
hoping for the church at all.” Of course, if those folks are hoping that
Francis is going to ditch the “Catholic” in “Catholic Church,” they are
bound to be disappointed. And, to be clear, I'm not upset at all that
Francis was selected as TIME's “Person of the Year.” As for Miley Cyrus,
I think she needs to stop all of her prancing around and do something
truly revolutionary and radical with her life: become a cloistered nun.

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